Dawn Wind

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Hearing her husky level voice and seeing the look in her eyes as she spoke, Owain did not doubt that the story was perfectly true. But for the moment there were other things about her that interested him more. ‘What are you doing here alone in Viroconium?’ he demanded, frowning. ‘If you are alone. I thought the town was empty.’

  ‘No.’ She was rubbing her bare feet one over the other where the warmth of the fire fell. ‘It was not empty. I was here all the time.’

  ‘Since the Saxons came?’

  ‘Yes, since—then.’

  Owain said hoarsely, ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘There was a great stir all through the city, and they cried that the Saxons were coming and all the farms that way’—she pointed south and east with a bony finger—‘were burning. And all the people caught up food and the things they wanted most to save, that were light enough to carry, and ran away into the hills. I ran with them, but only a little way, and when the Saxons had gone again and the fire died down, I came back.’

  ‘Why?’

  She looked at him with those strange rain-grey eyes wide and grave. ‘It is the only place I know.’

  Owain was silent a moment; then he said, ‘Weren’t you afraid to be here all alone, with the town dead and empty?’

  ‘No. I would have been more afraid where the others went, into the hills. There were no roofs to hide you from the sky.’

  ‘There aren’t many here.’

  ‘There are little dark corners. Besides—’ and her voice hardened with vicious satisfaction, ‘Viroconium I like better without people in it.’

  In the complete silence that followed, Owain heard the wind rising, rustling the scorched leaves to and fro. Despite himself he was aware of a sudden ache of pity. He did not want to feel it, because he knew that it was the beginning of things coming back to life in him and that coming back to life would hurt like the blood running back into a frozen limb.

  Regina heard the wind too, and shivered, creeping a little closer to the fire, her thin wisp of a face sharpened with entreaty; and he saw that she was afraid she had made him angry—and he had a fire. The beggar’s whine was back in her voice. ‘You’ll not turn me away? The wind blows so cold now that it is autumn. Let me sit near the fire. See—not very near, just where a little warmth reaches.’

  Owain glared, guarded and resentful because she was making things come alive in him, and it hurt; oh, how it hurt! But he knew that he could no more turn her away from his fire than he could have turned Dog. ‘There is fire to spare for both of us. Stay if you must,’ he said grudgingly. And she sighed and folded up on to her heels as though she had been there all along.

  Owain sat on his haunches with Dog sprawled against him, and went on staring at her, while she leaned forward holding her hands to the flame. They were so thin that the fire shone through them red, and he could see the delicate shadows of the bones. ‘Why have you followed me and watched me in secret all day?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I wanted to see what you were doing, and I was afraid if you saw me you would throw stones at me.’

  ‘Did people often throw stones at you?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite often.’ She turned the backs of her hands to the fire. ‘What were you doing? Why have you come to Viroconium?’

  Owain stared into the fire and scratched the scar on his arm. ‘I was with Kyndylan’s war-host—I and my father and my brother—when we gathered here in the spring. And after—after it was all over’—his voice began to shake and he steadied it carefully—‘I thought that if there were any more of us left alive, they might gather here again; and if I came back, I—might find them.’ It was odd: with their sitting down by the fire together, something had changed between him and the girl. A little while ago he would not have told her that; he would simply have bidden her go tend her own business.

  She looked at him quickly; all her movements were as though quicksilver ran in her veins. ‘There was a battle? And the Saxons won?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No one came,’ Regina said.

  Owain shook his head, still staring into the red heart of the fire.

  She reached out in a little while, and pointed at the purplish scar that showed below his sleeve. ‘It was in the battle you got that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said again.

  Regina gazed at it in silence. Then she thrust out one small bare foot and turned the sole upward for him to see. ‘Look, I have a scar here. I got it on a piece of broken glass.’

  Owain looked. Her foot was dusty and scurfed, ingrained grey and brown with ancient dirt; but through the dirt he could see the thin white scar running jagged from the arch down towards the root of the big toe. For a moment, because he had grown up in the past months and forgotten some of the things he once knew, he was not sure why she was showing it to him. Was she proud of it? Had she perhaps used it in her begging, to get sympathy and so more charity? And then he understood, remembering himself and Ossian comparing their backs after a beating. Comparing scars was a companionable thing to do. It was a gesture of friendship; probably the first she had ever made.

  He reached out and touched her foot, feeling it icy under the caked dryness of the dirt. ‘That must have hurt,’ he said gruffly. ‘Your feet are still frozen. Put them nearer to the fire.’

  She did as he told her, sighing in the warmth, and asked, ‘What is your name? I told you mine.’

  ‘Owain,’ he said. And then, ‘I set the snare again before I came away. Maybe there’ll be another hare tomorrow.’

  When the little fire burned out, they spread the bedding-grass wider, and shared Owain’s cloak. It was ragged at the hem by now, but thick, and big enough for two if they lay close together. Dog slept with his chin across Owain’s knees, and growled very softly in warning, every time the girl moved in the night.

  In the morning they were hungry again. They went, all three of them, to the lion-headed fountain, and then to get some apples. ‘The one you tried yesterday came from a tree they used to make apple wine from,’ Regina said. ‘That is why it was so sour. But I can show you the apple trees that are sweet.’ And if the water and apples did not really satisfy them, it killed some of their hunger for the time being. And when Owain went back to the deserted burial ground, he found another hare in one of the snares. So they were sure of full stomachs again tonight.

  It was a piece of unbelievably good fortune, but he realized that he could not go on snaring the same runs over and over again; he must widen his hunting grounds. He reset his snares on the edge of the woods above the river gorge, about a bowshot beyond the last of the gravestones, the girl Regina tagging along behind him like a shadow, though he felt her scared unwillingness, and knew that she did not like to come so far beyond the city walls. ‘I might get a hedgehog hereabouts,’ he said. ‘We will not cook the hare until this evening. It is better to eat at the end of the day, and sleep with something in one’s belly.’

  And together, Owain carrying the hare, they made their way back into the city.

  In the Wild, Regina was lost and unsure of herself, but once back within the walls, it was another matter. She slipped into the lead, catching his free hand and pulling him after her by back ways and short cuts, in at the gaping doorway of one house and out through the broken wall at the back of another; and about every corner of every ruin she seemed to have something, mostly disgraceful, to tell of the people who had once lived there.

  Down an alley off the street to the West Gate, they came to the blind-eyed shell of a house, with a fire-blackened hawthorn twisted as wrought-iron-work leaning over the doorway in its courtyard wall. ‘That is the house of Ulpius Pudentius,’ said Regina. ‘He was very old, and they said he had bags and boxes full of gold under his bed. They said—everybody said—that his forefathers made it by doctoring broken-winded mules and selling them to the soldiers while they seemed all right.’ She was leaning on the remains of the door timbers as she spoke, her pointed chin in her hands as she stared through. ‘He onc
e gave me a copper coin. I was the only beggar he ever did that to.’

  ‘How did that happen?’ Owain said, staring into the little courtyard beside her.

  ‘I ran behind him in the street on all fours, and brayed,’ said Regina. ‘He threw it at me to go away.’

  They hid the paunched hare in a convenient hole in Kyndylan’s private colonnade, and spent part of the rest of the day making their lair more comfortable, getting in more firewood and more grass for bedding. They found an old rust-eaten sword in the ruins of a house, and brought it in to spike the hare on when the time came to cook it. It seemed to have become an accepted thing that the lair was for both of them now. Owain never asked her where she had slept before; maybe she had had no particular hideout but had merely curled up in a different corner every night.

  He went back to look at his snares much earlier that evening than he had done yesterday, because of Regina, but even so, she did not come with him that time, but slipped off by herself at the last moment on some business of her own. The snares were all empty, and one of them had been interfered with by a fox. He reset it, and came back through the wild burial ground and the dead streets of Viroconium to the store-room at the far end of Kyndylan’s Palace.

  Regina was not there, and suddenly the little dark lair looked empty without her. But he had scarcely had time to notice that when he heard the patter of bare feet and saw her coming towards him along the broken colonnade, with her tattered skirt gathered up in front of her, very carefully, as though she had something precious hidden in its folds. Dog, who had by now accepted her into their company, swung his tail in greeting, and thrust a hopeful muzzle at whatever it was she carried; and Owain cuffed him away, but looked curiously in the same direction himself. ‘What have you got there?’

  For answer, she opened the gathered-up folds of her skirt, and he saw that the treasure was a few handfuls of yellow grain.

  ‘Where did you find that?’

  ‘It is in the baskets under the big baker’s shop in the Forum. The rats eat it too. There are still a few cats—you can hear them singing sometimes at night when there’s a moon. But there aren’t enough to keep the rats down, and so they eat the corn. But there’s still quite a lot left.’

  So that was how she had kept alive all this while. He had not thought to wonder until now. When she first appeared, her coming had been so startling, and afterwards it seemed so much a matter of course, that either way he had not thought to wonder how she had lived before.

  As she spoke, she had gathered the folds of her skirt into one hand, and with the other she was picking out a few golden grains. With a curious deliberate delicacy, as though she was doing something familiar that delighted her, and making it last as long as possible, she scattered them almost singly, a few on the broken pavement, a few more on the half wall of the colonnade.

  There had not seemed to be any birds about when she started, but on the instant, with a purr of wings from all directions, they were there; dust-coloured sparrows cuddling to the ground, a robin perched on long legs, a rose-breasted chaffinch, a shy thrush hovering on the outskirts of the throng; and the grey flagstones were alive with them among the gold-spangling of the scattered barley.

  And then, with a flash of jewel-blue through the air, a tit darted to her feet, where she had dropped the last grain of all.

  Dog stiffened, thrusting forward his broad muzzle towards the impertinent feathered atom on the pavement; and the tit, waking to the presence of unknown monsters, started, spread its wings and made a sound like an infinitely small cat spitting; and losing its head, darted off in the wrong direction, through the dark store-room doorway, with Dog bounding in pursuit.

  Regina dropped her skirt, scattering the precious barley far and wide, and let out a shriek. ‘Oh! He’ll catch it! He’ll catch it!’

  ‘No he won’t.’ Owain flung himself after the great hound. He had forgotten the two steps down, his feet flew from under him, and he plunged forward with a yell, landing with most of the breath knocked out of him, but his arms fast about the hound’s neck. Dog threshed around with his tail lashing wildly behind him; the carefully built up firewood scattered right and left and above them the panic-stricken tit dashed itself from wall to wall.

  He heard Regina cry out as though the hurt was in herself: ‘Don’t! Oh don’t! You’ll hurt your wings!’ She slipped without speed across to the far wall, where the tit, ceasing for a moment its frantic darting to and fro, clung with wings spread to the broken plaster, and reached up her hands to it quite slowly. Owain sat among the wreckage of the fire, his arms still round the excited hound, and watched her as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  ‘Come then, stupid,’ she said, and gathered the tiny creature as though it had been a flower, closing her hollowed hands over it, and turned towards the door. Then she hesitated, and in the sudden quiet after the turmoil, came across to Owain, and stooped over him. ‘Look!’ she said on a clear note of delight, and parted her fingers a little. The last gold of the sunset streaming in through the low doorway, showed him the tit, captive but quite contented inside the globe of her thin brown hands; the bright eyes in the tiny painted clown’s face, the jewel-blue cap of feathers. ‘Isn’t it blue!’ said Regina. Then she went to the doorway and up the steps, and standing on the top one among the spilled barley, opened her hands. The tit sprang upward, hung for a moment on vibrating wings that were like tiny fans of blue-green mist against the low sunlight, and darted off. She stood for a moment gazing after it. Then she turned back to the darkening room.

  She saw Owain still sitting among the wreckage, with Dog clasped to his bosom; and flung herself down on the top step with her knees drawn up to her chin, and burst into shrill, hoarse, hooting laughter.

  He began to laugh, too, though it was laughter that tore painfully at the misery within him, and for a little while they rocked together. Owain was the first to recover, and scrambling to his feet, took command of the situation. ‘This will not get us any supper. Scrape up as much of the barley as you can, and I’ll go and fetch the hare.’

  It was dusk before the supper was cooking, for they had to remake the fire, and even when Owain had got a spark from his strike-a-light and managed to kindle it, they still had to skin the hare. But it was done at last, and the hare propped on its old sword-blade over the flames, while Dog worried the skin just as he had done last night. And Owain and Regina squatted beside the warmth, dipping turn and turn about in the yellow pool of very dusty grain in her lap and eating while they waited. Among the wood they had collected for the fire were some bits of a small olivewood chest that must have been brought from overseas long ago. The Saxons had burst it open in search of loot, and the little splintered planks were a good size for burning. (He must find something that he could break up bigger wood with, by and by.) It caught quickly when he fed the first bits to the fire, and burned with little oily flames that were blue as the top of the tit’s head. No, that was the wrong blue, Owain thought, more like the colour of wild hyacinths.

  Regina, glancing up from the grains of barley in her palm, seemed to notice something on the front of his tunic that she had not seen before. Then she pointed: ‘What is that?’

  And peering downward, Owain saw that his father’s ring was hanging in full view. It must have tumbled through the neck of his tunic when he fell down the steps after Dog. His first instinct was to thrust it back out of sight, muttering that it was not anything in particular. But Regina had shown him the scar on her foot in exchange for his; she had not minded him seeing when she fed the birds—and remembering the wolfish way she had eaten last night, he had the sense to know how much feeding the birds must mean to her—and she had shared the blueness of the tit with him before she let it go. He slipped the thong over his head, and held it out to her. ‘It was my father’s ring. It is mine now.’

  The light of the flames caught the flawed emerald and it blazed into a flake of green fire between his fingers; and she leaned towards it wit
h a little gasp, her dirty hand darting out to take it. ‘You must have been very rich!’ she said, and her fingers suddenly looked like little brown claws. He had not thought of his father’s ring as being valuable, only as being precious.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s the only jewel we ever had; and look, it is flawed … There was just the farm, and it was all we could do to keep the roof on the byres.’

  ‘Farm? You had a farm all of your own? Where was that?’

  ‘Over that way, maybe a day’s march.’ He jerked his head towards the south-eastern corner of the little room.

  Regina glanced in the same direction, as though she expected to see the farm in the shadows beyond the firelight. ‘The Saxons came that way,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘I know,’ Owain said, staring at the hare. He was thinking of the burnt-out farms that he had passed two days ago. He had been careful not to think of his own farm ever since. He knew now that he would never go back to see what the Saxons had left.

  Regina was turning the ring between her fingers, her head bent over it. ‘There’s a queer fish-thing carved on it. Is it very old?’

  ‘That’s a dolphin,’ Owain said. ‘Yes, it is old. It came from somewhere beyond the seas—Rome, I suppose—when we did. And that was when the Eagles first came to Britain.’

  But he saw that she did not know what he was talking about. He knew, because his father had told him what his father had told him; but there had been no one to tell Regina. Anyhow, it didn’t matter. It was all dead now.

  ‘You should take better care of it,’ said Regina, with a hint of scolding in her tone. ‘I could have cut the thong and stolen it quite easily in the night, if I had known that it was there.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning. I’ll sleep with my hand over it tonight.’

  She looked up at him with those strange rain-grey eyes, and said simply, ‘No, you need not. It is no good stealing now. There is nothing in Viroconium to buy with gold.’